On Color
Meditations in Color began with a studio question: how do artists actually work with color when you look across a body of work rather than a few familiar images?
Above all, I wanted it to become a place to come and meditate in color. In the absence of a coherent collection that lets you sit with an artist's chromatic life in one field of attention, I began building the place I wanted for myself and for friends and acquaintances who had long wished for it too: somewhere to take in Matisse's colors across his works, or Bonnard's, or Morandi's, as fully as possible in one place.
What interests me is not color symbolism alone, but color in use: how it holds form, creates rhythm, establishes pressure, sets distance, and continues to operate even as subject matter, medium, and composition change around it. I return to artworks for instruction and companionship, but also to understand how color behaves once attention stays with the surface itself.
This is what anchors the project. It treats color not as an accessory to form, but as one of the ways form is made. That question began in painting, but it was never only a question about painting.
On The Archives
The project began as a digital archive and research platform spanning painters from the fifteenth century to the present. For each artist, I try to gather as much of the work as possible into one place, then build pages organized by palette, chromatic relationship, tonal range, and atmosphere.
The archive is not meant as an encyclopedia alone. It is meant as a place of looking. The point is to make artists legible through chromatic behavior: what recurs, what widens or narrows over time, what tones seem to structure an entire practice, and what colors keep returning as habits of seeing and making.
The platform is also a resource. Artists, designers, students, and general audiences can compare palettes across whole bodies of work, copy them directly for inspiration, and carry those lessons into their own practice.
The Colorist Archive, that first one, remains the center of the project. What has changed is that it is no longer the only one.
On Widening the Field
The archive started with painting because that is where I look longest. But the method turned out not to be about painting. Gather a whole body of work, read it by palette rather than by subject, and let the pattern rather than the single famous image do the talking: that works anywhere images are made in quantity by people with a consistent eye.
The Movie Poster Color Archive is the first extension of it. It reads filmographies instead of oeuvres and directors instead of painters, and in doing so it changes what the reading is about. A poster is a designed, commercial, negotiated object. Its color has to work at a distance, survive reproduction, sell a film, and sit inside the conventions of its decade and its genre. Where a painter's palette is largely a private decision accumulated over years, a poster's is a public one made under constraint, often by hands the film never credits.
That difference is the reason to build it rather than an argument against building it. Placing the two archives beside each other makes both stranger and more legible: it shows where chromatic decisions are free and where they are negotiated, and how much of what we read as an era's color is a matter of pigment, of printing, of taste, or of the market.
Upcoming sectionWhat follows sets out the thinking behind the Album Cover Archive. The archive itself has not launched; it is in preparation and will open once the work is ready.
The Album Cover Archive is the second extension, and it reads a different kind of object again. An album cover is a container for something you cannot see. Its color does not describe its contents the way a poster describes a film or a painting describes its own surface; it stands in for sound, and the conventions for doing that were invented and re-invented decade by decade.
Its constraints are unusual. The square was fixed for half a century by the physical record and has outlived the object that imposed it. Color here often belongs to a label or a house style as much as to a musician: Blue Note under Reid Miles, ECM, 4AD and Factory each impose a palette across artists who have nothing else in common. And a cover is re-dressed over time in a way a painting never is, reissued and repackaged until several palettes claim the same record.
The archive spans a change of format rather than sitting on one side of it. Roughly seven in ten of these covers were made for an object you held at twelve inches, and the rest were made for a screen, most often at the size of a thumbnail. Whatever color does at that scale is a different job from the one the format was invented for, and having both in the same field of attention is the use of it: you can watch the constraint change and see which chromatic habits survived.
Three archives now sit beside each other: color chosen privately over a lifetime, color negotiated commercially for a single release, and color standing in for something with no appearance at all.
Upcoming sectionTwo of those three are live. The third, the album covers, is still to come.
On Structure and Generation
My own practice runs alongside the archive and is built on duality: an ordered system, a rule or a geometry, set against the chance and deviation that resist it, with color present from the start as one of its materials rather than something added once the structure is settled.
What the studies are really doing is representing color in more than one way at once. Geometry is one representation, the measured and resolvable side of it. Chance is another, the part that will not be planned. Setting a palette inside that tension turns it into something you can contemplate freely rather than read: not the painting’s color explained, but its color let loose in a structure built to test it. What survives varies. Sometimes proportion carries, sometimes contrast, recurrence, balance, or pause. The aim is never imitation.
The Drawing System
A second part, and a narrower one. It lets visitors work with palettes directly, adapting them for their own experiments or building palettes of their own, and in time I hope it can become a scaffold for other artists to set studies beside these. For now it draws only on the painting archive. The posters and the album covers are places of looking, not source material.
The Palette Studio
The studio is the other half of that, and the more used one. It takes an image, either one you upload or one pulled from the painting or movie archive, reads the color out of it, gives every color a pigment name, and then draws that palette back at you as a study.
The readings are the substance of it. A few are plain: the palette as stripes, as a field weighted by how much of the picture each color actually holds, as pairs. Some are borrowed from people who spent their lives trying to make color systematic. Chevreul’s circle, Runge’s sphere, Itten’s star, Ostwald’s scales, Vanderpoel’s grid, Harris’s wheel, Maxwell’s disc, Le Corbusier’s keyboard. Each was an attempt to give color an order it does not naturally have, and each one fails somewhere interesting. Putting a single palette through Runge and then through Ostwald does not settle which of them is right. It shows what each system is prepared to notice, and what it has to throw away to stay a system.
That is the reason the studio is a tool and not a page. The archives are for looking. The studio is for handling: you take a palette out of the work that made it, set it inside somebody else’s geometry, and see what survives the transfer. It runs on the same duality the studies do, an order set against what resists it, except here the order is borrowed and the palette is not mine.
Whatever is drawn there is kept in Collected Palettes, a wall of every reading anyone has made. The image is never saved. The record holds the color and the name alone, and a way back to the work if the work came from the archive. It is the one part of the project written by whoever turns up.
Color Flâneur
This project has been built in public, and it keeps finding new pathways. It began as an archive of painters, then took in posters, then album covers, and each addition arrived less as a plan than as a direction the work wandered into and found worth following. I have stopped treating that as a failure of scope.
There is a throughline underneath the wandering. The effort is to become the largest archive of color across visual culture: not one medium studied thoroughly, but color followed wherever it is made in quantity by people with a consistent eye. Painting is the deepest record of that, but it is not the only one, and the further the archive reaches the more the comparisons start to say something.
What it becomes at that scale is a visual commentary on the color we are handed every day. Sleeves, posters, packaging and screens are where most people meet color most often, chosen by someone, for a reason, under constraint. Reading them beside five centuries of painting is a way of noticing decisions that were designed not to be noticed.
It is both a surrender and a study. A surrender to the beauty and instability of color, and a study of how it survives transformation through structure and variation.
What I am ultimately working toward is a living record of how color has been used: one that can hold patterns across centuries, changes in available pigments and materials, and shifts in how visual culture organizes color over time. The archives are the body of that work, and the Drawing System is one way of testing what a palette can still do once it is lifted out.
